Expectations

The proprietor of 51 Pepys Road, in South London, Roger Yount, sat at his desk at his bank, Pinker Lloyd, doing sums. He was trying to calculate whether his bonus for 2007 would come to a million pounds.

At forty, Roger was a man to whom everything in life had come easily. He was six feet three, not quite tall enough to feel a need to conceal it by stooping—so that even his height appeared a form of ease, as if gravity had, when he was growing up, exerted less effect on him than on more ordinary people. The resulting complacency seemed so well deserved, and came with so little necessity to emphasize his own good fortune relative to anyone else’s, that it appeared as a form of charm. It helped that Roger was good-looking, in an anonymous way, and had such good manners. He had been to a good school (Harrow) and a good university (Durham) and got a good job (in the City of London) and been perfect in his timing (just after the Big Bang, just before the City became infatuated with the mathematically gifted and/or barrow boys). He would have fit seamlessly into the old City of London, where people came in late and left early and had a good lunch in between, and where everything depended on who you were and whom you knew and how well you blended in, and the greatest honor was to be one of us and to “play well with others”; but he fit in very well in the new City, too, where everything was supposedly meritocratic, where the ideology was to work hard, play hard, and take no prisoners; to be in the office from seven to seven, minimum, and where nobody cared what your accent was or where you came from as long as you showed you were up for it and made money for your employer. Roger had a deep, instinctive understanding of the way in which people in the new City liked people who reminded them of the old City as long as they accepted the new City’s way of doing things, and he was very adroit at signalling his status as someone who would have been at home in the old world but who loved the modern one—even his clothes, beautifully made suits from a wide-boy, Flash Harry tailor just off Savile Row, showed that he understood. (His wife, Arabella, helped him with that.) He was a popular boss, who never lost his temper and was good at letting people get on with things.

That was an important skill. A skill worth a million quid in a good year, you would have thought. . . . But it was not straightforward for Roger to calculate the size of his bonus. His employer, a smallish investment bank, did not make it straightforward, and there were many factors to consider, to do with the size of the company’s profits over all, the portion of those profits made by his department, which traded in foreign-currency markets, the relative performance of his department when compared with its competitors, and a number of other calculations, many of them not at all transparent, and some of them based on subjective judgments of how well he had performed as a manager. There was an element of deliberate mystification about the process, which was in the hands of the Compensation Committee, sometimes known as the Politburo.

Sitting on Roger’s desk were three computer screens, one of them tracking departmental activity in real time, another being Roger’s own P.C., given over to e-mail and I.M. and videoconferencing and his diary, and the third tracking trades in the foreign-exchange department over the year. According to that one, his team was showing a profit of about seventy-five million pounds on a turnover of six hundred and twenty-five million pounds so far, which, although he said it himself, wasn’t bad. Simple justice, looking at those numbers, would surely see him awarded a bonus of a million pounds. But it had been a strange year in the markets, ever since the collapse of Northern Rock, a few months before. Basically, the Rock had destroyed itself with its own business model. Its credit had dried up, the Bank of England had been asleep, and the punters had panicked. Since then, credit had been more expensive, and people were twitchy. That was O.K. as far as Roger was concerned, because in the foreign-exchange business twitchy meant volatile, and volatile meant profitable. The FX world had seen a number of fairly self-evident one-way bets against high-interest currencies: the Argentinean peso, for instance; some rival firms’ FX departments had, he knew, made out like bandits. This was where the lack of transparency became a problem. The Politburo might be benchmarking him against some impossible standard of profitability based on some whiz-kid idiot, some boy racer who had pulled off a few crazy unhedged bets. There were certain numbers that couldn’t be beaten without taking what the bank told him to think of as unacceptable risks. The way it worked, however, was that the risks tended to seem less unacceptable when they were making you spectacular amounts of money.

Another potential problem was that the bank might claim to be making less money over all this year, so that bonuses in general would be down on expectations—and, indeed, there were rumors that Pinker Lloyd was sitting on some big losses in its mortgage-loan department. There had also been a well-publicized disappointment over its Swiss subsidiary, which had been outcompeted in a takeover fight and seen its stock price drop thirty per cent as a result. The Politburo might claim that “times are hard” and “the pain must be shared equally” and “we’re all giving a little blood this time” and (with a wink) “next year in Jerusalem.” What a gigantic pain in the arse that would be.

Roger moved around in his swivel chair so that he was looking out the window toward Canary Wharf. The rain had cleared, and the early-setting December sun was making the towers, normally so solid-looking and unethereal, seem momentarily aflame with clean gold light. He swivelled back the other way. He preferred to face inward, toward “the pit,” as everyone called it, in honor of the trading floors, where people yelled and fought and waved papers—though the foreign-exchange trading department couldn’t be less like that, as forty people sat at screens, murmuring into headsets or at one another, but in general hardly looked up from the flow of data. His office had glass walls, and there were blinds that could be lowered when he wanted privacy. Most of the time, though, he liked having his blinds up and the door of his office open so that he could feel the activity in the room outside. Roger knew from experience that being cut off from your department was a risk, and that the more you knew about what was going on among your underlings the less chance you had of getting unpleasant surprises.

Roger was not personally ambitious; he mainly wanted life not to make too many demands on him. One of the reasons he had fallen for and married Arabella was that she had a gift for making life seem easy. But he wanted to do well and to be seen as doing well; and he did very much want his million-pound bonus. He wanted a million pounds because he had never earned it before and he felt it was his due and a proof of his masculine worth. But he also wanted it because he needed the money. The figure of a million pounds had started as a vague, semi-comic aspiration and had become an actual necessity, something he needed to pay the bills and set his finances on the square. His basic pay of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds was nice as what Arabella called “frock money,” but it did not cover even his two mortgages.

The house in Pepys Road had cost two and a half million pounds, which at the time had felt like the top of the market, even though prices had risen a great deal since then. They had converted the loft, dug out the basement, redone all the wiring and the plumbing because there was no point in not doing it, knocked through the downstairs, added a conservatory, built out the side extension, and redecorated from top to bottom. (Joshua’s room had a cowboy theme, Conrad’s a spaceman motif, though he had started to express a preference for all things Viking, and Arabella was thinking about a redesign.) The kitchen had initially been from Smallbone of Devizes, but Arabella had gone off that and got a new German one with an amazing smoke extractor and a colossal American fridge. The nanny flat had been done up with a separate pair of rooms and kitchen, because in Arabella’s view it was important for the nanny to have that feeling of cut-offness when she, whoever she was, had boyfriends over to stay. But, in the event, they didn’t like having a live-in nanny, that sense of someone under their feet, and there was something naff and seventies about the idea of having a lodger, so the flat was empty. The sitting room was underwired and the Bang & Olufsen system could stream music through all the adult rooms of the house. The television was a sixty-inch plasma. On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger’s considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus V.A.T. Leaving out the furnishings but including architects’, surveyors’, and builders’ fees, the work on the Younts’ house had cost about six hundred and fifty thousand pounds.

The Old Parsonage in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, had also not been cheap. It was a lovely building from 1780, though the outside impression of Georgian airiness and proportion was undermined by the fact that the rooms were smallish and the windows admitted less light than one might expect. Still. Their offer of nine hundred thousand pounds had been accepted and then gazumped, for nine hundred and seventy-five thousand, so they had had to regazump, and it had become theirs for a cool million pounds.

Minchinhampton was lovely—you can’t beat the English countryside. Everyone agreed. But going there for your major summer holiday was a little bit dowdy, Arabella felt. It was more of a weekend place. So they also went away for two weeks in the summer, taking a few friends and, on alternate years, inviting either Roger’s or Arabella’s parents for one week out of the two. The going rate for the sort of villa they had in mind seemed to be ten thousand pounds a week. Any flights would be taken business class, since Roger thought that the whole point of having money, if it had to be summed up in a single point, which it couldn’t, but if you had to, the whole point of having a bit of money was not to have to fly scum class.

The other costs, when you began to think about them, added up, too. Pilar, the nanny, was twenty thousand pounds a year out of net income—more like thirty-five thousand gross, once all the pissy employment taxes were allowed for. Sheila, the weekend nanny, was another two hundred pounds a time, adding up to about nine thousand (though they paid her in cash and they didn’t pay her for holidays, unless she came with them, which she often did; or they would get another nanny from an agency). Arabella’s BMW M3 “for the shops” had been fifty-five thousand pounds and the Mercedes S400, the principal family car, which was used in practice by the nanny on the school run and playdates, was seventy-five thousand. Other things: a tax bill of about two hundred and fifty thousand from last year, a need to make a pension contribution “well into six figures,” as his accountant put it, ten thousand pounds for their annual summer party, and then the general hard-to-believe expensiveness of everything in London—restaurants and shoes and parking fines and cinema tickets and gardeners and the feeling that every time you went anywhere or did anything money just started melting off you. Roger didn’t mind that, he was completely up for it, but it did mean that if he didn’t get his million-pound bonus this year he was at genuine risk of going broke.

At 51 Pepys Road, Mrs. Arabella Yount, who had once read a book about how women were better than men at multitasking, was doing four different things at the same time: she was putting up some shelves in the tiny storeroom that she liked to call her pantry; she was looking after her two lovely children, Joshua and Conrad; she was shopping for clothes on the Internet; and she was making plans to give her husband a nasty fright.

Two of those tasks Arabella had subcontracted to other people. The shelves were being put up by her Pole, Bogdan the builder, whom she had started using after a recommendation from a friend and had now adopted as her own. He worked twice as hard as a British worker, was twice as reliable, and cost half as much. Something similar could be said about Pilar, their Spanish nanny, who was looking after her two boys. Arabella had found Pilar through an agency. She had a qualification in child care (in fact, had a degree) and a valid driving license, could cook, didn’t mind doing her share of the housework, got on famously with Maria the cleaner, which was good because otherwise it could have been a bit embarrassing on the two days they were both in the house, and, most important—it went without saying that it was by far the most important—was just heavenly with her two boys. Conrad and Joshua positively doted on Pilar.

There was only one problem with Pilar, which was that she was leaving them to go back to Spain. That was scheduled to happen just before Christmas. Pilar had told Arabella six weeks earlier. She was going back to a job at a nursery school. A new nanny would begin work in the New Year, but the Younts would be without any child care over the holidays. When she’d realized that and begun to think about it, Arabella had had the initial flickering of an idea.

For some time now, almost everything about her husband had made Arabella cross. It had begun with the birth of Conrad, eased off a bit after he got to his second birthday, then got much worse when she was pregnant with Joshua, and worse still after he was born. Joshua was now three years old and Arabella was as cross with her husband as she had ever been. The shorthand term for what she felt was “competitive tiredness.” She felt she was so tired that she could not think or see straight; she felt that she began the day tired, thanks to the broken and shallow sleep she had been having for, literally, years now, and got more tired as the day wore on, and that there were times when she was running on, as she put it, “sheer adrenaline”; but that when her husband came home from work he had the temerity to act as if he were the one making all the effort, as if he were the one who had the right to sigh and put his feet up and talk about what a tiring day he’d had! As for weekends, in some ways they were even worse. Sheila, the Australian weekend nanny, was very helpful (though she was no Pilar—for one thing, she couldn’t drive), but there was still masses to do, and her husband did very little of it. He didn’t cook, except showoff barbecues on the occasional summer weekend at his silly boy-toy gas grill, and he didn’t wash clothes or iron them or sweep the floor or, hardly at all, play with the children. Arabella did not do those things, either, not much, but that did not mean that she went through life acting as if they did not exist, and it was this obliviousness that drove her so nuts.

The idea Arabella had had was quite simply to vamoose and leave Roger to it for a few days, with no warning. He could learn about looking after the children and the house by doing it for a few days, solo. While he was doing it, Arabella would be at X. X was nowhere definite, not yet, and yet Arabella had very specific ideas about X. It was going to be a luxury hotel, somewhere not exhaustingly far from London, with a spa.

Arabella was not contemplating running away forever. She couldn’t possibly leave Conrad and Joshua. The point was to give her husband a nasty shock. Ideally, the shock of his life. He had no idea, no idea, of the burden actually involved in looking after the children and running the house. No idea. Well, this would bloody well give him an idea.

Beside Arabella on the floor was a pile of perhaps twenty hotel brochures. If her husband had noticed them—which assumed that he ever noticed anything—he would have thought she was planning to nag him about holidays. This would teach him. In addition, the Web browser on her computer had six different windows open. The current most promising candidate was a hotel in the New Forest that offered a getaway package starting at four thousand pounds for two, though the nicer-looking package, which included a daily massage and pampering, was fifty-three hundred—not unreasonable, Arabella felt, for what it was. The idea of luxury, even the word “luxury,” was important to Arabella. Luxury meant something that was by definition overpriced, but was so nice, so lovely, in itself that you did not mind, in fact was so lovely that the expensiveness became part of the point. Arabella knew that there were thoughtlessly rich people who could afford everything, but she didn’t see herself as one of them. She loved expensive things because she knew what their expensiveness meant. She had a complete understanding of the signifiers.

The tricky thing could be friends: you needed friends who felt the same way. And who had the money to act on the feeling. Luckily, Saskia was one of them. She had been dumped by her shit of a husband eighteen months before but had cleaned him out in the divorce, so for this sort of adventure she was perfect. Arabella picked up her mobile phone, flipped it open, and said, “Saskia.” The phone rang four times.

“Babes!” said Saskia, who was thirty-seven.

“Darling!” said Arabella, who was also thirty-seven. “I think I’ve found somewhere down south. Shall I read you all the porn or just book?”

“Darling, you know I trust you.”

“Big kiss.”

When Roger had something important on at work, he did something that he’d never told anyone about: he made a huge deal of his washing and grooming. He showered and shaved as usual, shampooed and conditioned his hair, and then moisturized with a face mask that he left on for ten minutes, trimmed any stray nose or ear hair, rubbed some lotion into his legs and chest, took some vitamins, took some artichoke pills for his liver, did some stretches, went downstairs in his dressing gown, and ate a bowl of microwaved porridge. Then he dressed in his best clothes: his softest, lushest Savile Row shirt and its matching tie, a pocket square, antique cufflinks Arabella had found on eBay, the suit he’d had made bespoke after a bonus, the handmade shoes, and, underneath the ensemble, the slinkiest secret of them all, his special lucky silk underpants, brought back by Arabella from a shopping junket to Antwerp. The paradoxical effect of all this pampering was to make him feel fortified, defended, ready for trouble.

It was thus armored that, on Friday, December 21st, Roger went into the conference room at Pinker Lloyd ready to open the envelope that would tell him what he would be getting for his bonus.

In the room was Max, the head of the Compensation Committee. Junior employees receiving their bonuses would tend to have more than one person in the room, in case they flipped out in a bad year, which meant that they had to have more than one person in the room in good years, too, so that the number of people in the room didn’t become an immediate giveaway as to the size of the bonus. Heads of department got more credit than that. When Roger had been more junior, by this point he would already have known the tenor of the bonus meetings—what kind of mood music was being sent out about bonuses in general. So you would be braced for a downer or psyched about a good year. Now he had no warning. No point trying to pick up cues in body language from Max; he did deadpan for a living. His form of deadpan was smiley and let’s-be-friends.

“Roger!” Max said, pointing at the seat opposite.

“Max,” Roger said. “Petra well? Toby and Isabella?”

“All good,” Max said. “Arabella? Conrad?” And then there was a half-a-beat or a quarter-of-a-beat pause while he stretched for the name; which meant that Roger had won this exchange. “Joshua?”

“Fit as fleas,” Roger said. “You know what they’re like about Christmas. They go mad, can’t get enough presents, impossible demands. And, of course, the children are excited about it, too.”

The two men shared a smile. Max reached into the leather folder in front of him and took out an envelope. Roger, who had been feeling cool and even-tempered in his silk knickers, felt his heart rate and blood pressure shoot up. A pound sign followed by a one with six zeros, one with six zeros, one with six zeros. Two with six zeros? No, that was greedy. One with six zeros.

“Good year for the department,” Max said.

Yesssssss!

“The figures speak for themselves.”

Yesssssss!

“As you know, it isn’t always straightforward to, ah, parse the relevant figures from our competitors, so the comparison can’t be exact, but we are confident that your department’s performance is in the top quartile for the sector.”

Roger knew that, or strongly suspected it, but it was still good to hear.

“Your personal evaluations are strong. The Compensation Committee is of the view that your performance over all is strong.”

Yesssssss! This wasn’t million-quid talk. This was two million, maybe more. Could he be heading for two and a half? He and Arabella might even have sex!

“There is, of course, a context for all this,” Max went on. Now, for a smaller man than Roger, a man with less steady nerves, this might have been a warning note, an incitement to panic; maybe, even, an invitation to think about missed mortgage payments, promised but unbought diamond necklaces, the deferment of holiday plans; because, to a lesser man than Roger, Max’s words might have sounded awfully like a “but.” Roger, however, was a veteran of Pinker Lloyd assessments. This was getting on for his twentieth. He knew that, just as a judge delivering a summing up likes to make both sides in court shit themselves before reaching his conclusion, a member of the Compensation Committee likes to have you thinking about bread and water before he gives you a villa in Poggibonsi with a line of cypresses down the drive, a small vineyard, and a heated swimming pool.

Actually, there was something to think about there. Minchinhampton was fine but, as previously noted, could be seen as dowdy, and it took only one wet summer to put you permanently off the whole holidays-in-England thing. A bonus of £2.5 million would, once he’d paid for all the things he had to pay for, salted some away in the pension and V.C.T.s and all that, leave him with a fair few quid left over. It was said you could get somewhere pretty habitable on Ibiza for a million quid. Worth thinking about.

Roger’s attention had wavered for only a moment, but when he got his focus back Max was saying, “. . . and of course the context for this is not just the wider problems in the industry, the cloud no larger than a man’s hand and all that, and the repricing of insurance and swaps. That’s just the general weather. In addition, there’s the difficulty we have been having with our Swiss subsidiary.”

And all of a sudden, just like that, Roger felt his bonus beginning to shrink. This was not mood music; this was an actual, genuine, no-bones-about-it “but.”

“. . . goes beyond routine volatility into areas of genuine loss. Once the extent of our subsidiary vehicle’s exposure to the U.S. market in insecure securitizations was fully known, in particular the fact that those losses are still not precisely assessed, though known as reaching into the ten figures in euros . . .”

Max was telling him that the bank had lost a couple of hundred million euros this year. This was through its Swiss subsidiary’s exposure to subprimes. Well, whoop-de-flipping-doo. Roger stopped listening. He was getting it in the arse, and didn’t need to know the details. Max talked on for a bit more and then the moment came when he slid the envelope across the table. It was clear that his bonus was going to be minute, could even be as little as his annual pay. In practical terms, that would be the same as being dragged out the back of the office and finished off with a bullet in the back of his neck.

Roger opened the envelope. It was stuck down, and for a moment he felt a flash of irritation at the prats who ran the bank, the kind of people who didn’t know the convention about hand-delivered letters, that they were never stuck down, on the basis that it was an implied insult to third parties handling the letter; the convention was that among gentlemen you could rest assured that private correspondence would go unread. But these nouveau twats had no idea about anything like that. He took out the piece of paper. His bonus for the year was thirty thousand pounds.

He knew that there was no point saying anything; that it would do no good to cough and splutter and remonstrate. And yet he found himself saying, “But . . . what . . . it isn’t . . . contribution, billions . . . fundamentally not fair . . . when I think of what I’ve done . . . basic pay . . . not a question of greed but of necessary . . .”

What was the point? There was no point. Roger stopped talking. He felt his stomach twitch, and then churn, and then he had a strange sensation in his esophagus, accompanied by a gust of something that was like nausea. Then he realized that it was, in fact, nausea. He felt sick. Actually, he more than felt sick; he was going to be sick. Roger slowly rose to a crouching position and leaned forward over the table. He nodded at Max. He turned and left the room. There might have been people in the corridor; he didn’t notice and didn’t care. The lavatory was ten paces away. Roger just made it to a cubicle.

When he had finished, he lowered the lid of the toilet and just stayed where he was, kneeling on the floor. Wasn’t this great? Wasn’t this perfect? It was funny to think of all the occasions in a man’s life, all the different contexts, when he was sick. It must add up to hundreds of pukings. Yes, Roger thought. I’ve been sick hundreds of times. There’s a whole thesaurus to describe it. Talking to the great white telephone. Parking a tiger. Blowing chunks. But this was different from all the other times he’d thrown up, because on all those other occasions, once he’d been sick, he felt better.

Hanging from a strap on the Tube as he went home on Christmas Eve, Roger thought about when might be the best time to tell Arabella about his nonexistent bonus. Arabella was good at making life seem easy, except when she suddenly and dramatically wasn’t. Roger had an intuition this might be one of those times.

It would have been better to have done it already, obviously. But on Friday he had just been too numb, too freaked, too incredulous, too sick. He’d been in no condition to have a long talk about his missing million pounds. . . . And, anyway, by the end of the day the impulse to blurt everything out had long since faded. A lesser man, Roger felt, would have gone home straight after being sick. Roger was made of sterner stuff, and anyway what would he do if he went home? Sit there blubbing and moping and waiting for Arabella to get back from the shops? No, he sucked it up, took it like a man, and spent the day hiding in his office and pretending to work.

Not that much work got done on December 21st at Pinker Lloyd, as the Compensation Committee broke its news. Every now and then, he would peek through the window and survey the scene in the trading room. There was no noise. People were just sitting there. A few of them had their heads in their hands. Others were standing around in a demoralized little group. They looked like refugees or something. Sad, so sad. It was like . . . Roger stretched to find some metaphor for the scale of the grief, the comprehensiveness of the disaster. Being in some shit hole in Iraq or somewhere, where some Yank pilot has dropped a bomb on you by mistake. Everybody’s blown into pieces, bits everywhere, limbs, blood, everything. And it’s not your fault. That was the key thing—not your fault. He hadn’t done anything wrong. But they’d gone and dropped the bomb regardless. Those bloody Yanks . . .

Anyway: Friday had been too soon, and there hadn’t really been an opportunity over the weekend. It was the sort of news you had to steel yourself to break, you had to create a pause around the moment, and now it was Monday, Christmas Eve, and there was no way this could possibly be the right time, could it? Not just to tell your wife you’d underperformed against your own expectations—expectations that Roger had foolishly mentioned to Arabella, one night a couple of months ago, when his marital stock had otherwise been rather low—but to tell your wife you’d underperformed by a cool nine hundred and seventy thousand pounds, that wasn’t the sort of gift you gave on Christmas Eve. Roger wasn’t a monster.

What with all the whatever, he’d barely had time to think about its being Christmas. At least he had sorted out Arabella’s present, some fancy sofa she’d had her eye on, which would be (this was the punch line) delivered on Christmas Day itself. Fair enough—if you were spending ten grand on a sofa, you could at least get the arsing thing delivered when you actually wanted it, even if it was Christmas.

The thing was to let Christmas be Christmas. Not to turn it into something out of a depressing film, “It’s a Wonderful Life” without the happy ending. “It’s a Shit Life and We’re Suddenly Poor.” No. Don’t tell her on Boxing Day, obviously. Tell her on the twenty-seventh, once they’d gone down to the country. Maybe go for a walk and tell her. He’d be carrying Joshua in a papoose on his back, which would make it hard for her to yell at him. As always, once he’d made a plan, Roger felt better.

He trotted up the stairs at the Tube station and came out into the dark of Christmas Eve. The high street was mayhem: half the people there doing last-minute Christmas shopping, the other half determined to start the first evening of the holiday smashed. The bars were heaving. Roger dodged drunks and shoppers. Church bells were ringing: for a moment Roger thought about rounding everybody up and dragging them to the service of lessons and carols. But that wasn’t really them, was it? No: shower, change, glass of champagne.

Roger was home. The front door bumped against Pilar’s bag—that’s right, she was off to whichever Latin country it was she was from, Colombia or something. At the other end of the open-plan ground floor, the television was showing one of Conrad’s Japanese-looking cartoon series. He would be sitting in front of the screen with his thumb in his mouth.

That was, as Roger’s conversations with her went, on the long side; weeks passed without his seeing Pilar at all. Roger walked through into the sitting room. Sure enough, Conrad was sucking his thumb and watching people fighting on rocket-powered skycycles. Arabella wasn’t with him, so she must be upstairs, perhaps settling Josh or on the phone making plans for New Year’s.

“Daddy’s just going to have a quick shower,” Roger said. His son made no sign of having heard him. From the noise and the general sense of dramatic urgency, Roger gathered that it was a crucial moment in the story. He went upstairs, undressed, ran the shower until it was hot and the room was half-full of steam, and then got in. He felt his muscles unknot and some of the horror of the bonus question melt away. It was Christmas: family time; quality time; the thing was to enjoy it. Yes. Roger shampooed his hair and shaved, both for the second time that day, then dressed in his non-going-out slouchy trousers and went downstairs. Time for a glass of Bollinger.

There was an envelope on the table addressed in Arabella’s large, looping, very feminine handwriting. Roger picked it up.

Dear Roger,

You stupid spoilt selfish shit, I have gone away for a few days. So that you get a glimpse of what it is like to be me, you spoilt lazy arrogant stuck-up typical male bastard. You have no idea at all what it’s like to look after the children, and you have no idea at all what the last couple of years have been like, so this is now your chance to try it and see. Pilar has gone and the nanny agencies will be shut for the next few days at least. Congratulations, you are looking after your two boys on your own. As for where I’ve gone that’s none of your fucking business but I will be back and when I am I’ll expect to see some changes in your attitude and in what you actually do. None of that coming home from work acting like you’re the one who has a difficult time of it.

Fuck off,

Arabella

It wouldn’t be true to say that Roger saw the funny side, or had glimpses of perspective, or anything like that; but there were one or two moments on Christmas morning when he was able to remember that things hadn’t always been like this. At about quarter to seven, for instance, he was downstairs on the sitting-room carpet trying to assemble a plastic robot that turned into a car and also into a gun and uttered set phrases through a speaker box and could also be operated by remote control. The problem was that it was a very complicated toy: not only was it highly fiddly, with hundreds of small parts, but it came with instructions that seemed designed with the conscious intention to confuse and mislead. Beside and around and beneath Roger, the floor was covered in pieces of Lego from several different kits, which Conrad had torn open and thrown around the room while his back was turned. Joshua had upended the gigantic box of Brio trains he’d been given, so a substrate of wooden train tracks and engines lay mixed in with the plastic, paper, torn boxes, and various other toys that had been briefly experimented with and discarded. Conrad had already broken one of his, a racing car with green stripes and a driver who was supposed to beep when you pressed down on his head, but who had been jammed down so firmly that he didn’t stop beeping, like an alarm. Roger hadn’t been able to find either an off switch or a battery hatch to open, so he had smashed the toy with a hammer.

No, Roger had not seen the funny side. But there had been a moment when, after looking at his watch, he had thought, I can remember when Christmas morning would start at about half past ten with a mimosa in bed. Now it begins at half past five, with a test of my fine motor skills and ability to read Korean.

There was no sense in which Roger had taken things lying down. The previous night, he had bundled a protesting Conrad off to bed, then hit Google. He had left messages on the answering machines of seven different nanny agencies and knew that he was going to hire the very first person who was available. So help was at hand. But help being at hand was no help, not right in the here and now, with his wife away wherever the hell she was, and his parents (a) in Majorca and (b) useless.

The question was what message to leave on Arabella’s mobile. He knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t answer it; he also knew that she’d be checking her messages, desperate to know how her plan had gone. His first impulse was to ring her up and rant, denounce, deplore, ask her who she thought she was, tell her just how lazy she was, just how little a clue she had, and by the way they were nine hundred and seventy thousand pounds short of where they needed to be this holiday. To tell her not to bother coming back; to tell her that the locks would be changed; that all further contact between them would have to be through solicitors.

But Roger also knew that she would be expecting and to some extent depending on a reaction along those lines. He had a simple maxim for all competitive or adversarial situations: work out what the other party least wants you to do, and then do it. On that basis, the thing that would most freak out Arabella was for him to be cool, to act as if nothing could have bothered him less than having the kids on his own over Christmas. Knowing Arabella, he guessed she would have gone to some posh spa or hotel. Well, she could stew there. He’d be fine with the boys. How hard could it be?

Now it was Christmas morning. Conrad and Joshua were sitting in front of the television watching a children’s program with shouting presenters. Roger knew that there were scandals involving children’s-TV presenters taking cocaine. To be that lively at quarter past seven in the morning, it would in Roger’s view have been much more shocking if they hadn’t been taking cocaine. In fact, now that he thought about it, maybe coke could be the secret of a whole new parenting strategy. . . .

But the television was a terrible mistake. He’d used it up too soon. Roger didn’t know that his boys eventually tired of television; they became febrile and listless. In that condition, it was as if they’d had too much sugar, and became unbiddable, unmalleable, prone to tantrums, both manic and exhausted at the same time. Roger should have used TV as a strategy of last resort. After no more than a couple of hours, he was knackered (also panicking, and full of rage and self-pity); Joshua and Conrad were tired, too, and bored, and bouncing on the sofa, each desperate for their father to play a strenuous game with him alone. With two sons and one father, that was impossible, which made it all the more necessary, until Joshua trumped his older brother by flinging himself off the sofa-side table while Roger was distracted, and bumping his head, and Conrad retaliated by smashing his biggest new Transformer—Optimus Prime, his favorite—against a table leg, so hard that it didn’t just break for effect but broke for real, and his tears and tantrum became real, too: genuine, inconsolable grief.

At that point, with his sons screaming and crying, and Roger, feeling as tired as he could ever remember feeling—weepy with tiredness, gritty-eyed, furious, heavy, as if lying down on the bed would make him sleep for a month—the doorbell rang. And rang again. Then again.

Who rang the bell like that on Christmas Day, for God’s sake? Roger thought, as he stepped on a sharp bit of Optimus Prime.

Three large men, all of them at least Roger’s height, were standing at the door with a huge package, wrapped in cardboard.

“Happy Christmas,” the largest of the large men said, in a booming Slavic accent. “We have a delivery for Mrs. Yount.” He lowered his voice to a loud whisper. “Sofa.” ♦

John Lanchester has written four novels and a memoir. His new book, “How to Speak Money,” came out last year.